As we near the end of 2015, there has been a flurry of activity coming from U.S. federal agencies in the Public Access policy arena. Late last week, the Department of Transportation (DOT) released its plan for ensuring public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, laying out a comprehensive framework to ensure access and productive reuse of its funded research outputs. And on Monday, the publisher-based CHORUS initiative issued a press release touting a new agreement with National Science Foundation (NSF), designed to supplement its current Public Access plan for its funded articles.

The facts contained in scholarly articles are what make them so useful and so valuable. Researchers recognize that the digital environment gives them the opportunity to use these articles, and to make sense of these facts in entirely new ways. They want, and need, the ability to fully use these articles – to freely download and search, text mine, data mine, compute on and crawl them as data – in order to advance their work, to discover, to innovate.

Following in the footsteps of other editors and authors, the six editors and thirty-one editorial board members of the Elsevier journal Lingua resigned on October 27, 2015, in protest of Elsevier’s practices. The Lingua editors argued that the journal’s price has steadily increased year after year, far outpacing the cost of production. The editors also cited Elsevier’s refusal to transition the journal to a “fair open access” model that would charge low and transparent article processing fees for authors, while allowing authors to retain copyright to their articles.

Today marks the beginning of the 8th International Open Access Week, which will be celebrated at hundreds of events across more than 50 countries around the world. This week, the Open Access community will raise awareness, celebrate progress, and lay the foundation for continued collective efforts to advance Open Access for the rest of the year.

Scientists have developed a comprehensive, open map of the relationships among all known life. The project illustrates how open-science principles and digital technology can bring together information to expand understanding of a complex subject.

Latin America is one of the world’s most progressive regions in terms of open access and adoption of sustainable, cooperative models for disseminating research; models that ensure that researchers and citizens have access to the results of research conducted in their region.